Kander and Ebb’s early-90s musical is having a moment. Next week, Bill Condon’s movie, starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez, goes on general release. And here, touring to Bristol and Southampton, is a slick, earnest revival by director Paul Foster. Despite the sudden focus, this is a rarity: fans of the musical and the Manuel Puig novel on which it is based have had to wait since 1992 for a major new staging.
There are possible reasons for this. The setting in a Buenos Aires prison is one of them, although it is not simply that Kiss of the Spider Woman is grim. There are other musicals with grim settings: Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret among them. More than that, it is hard for a production to make it grim enough without distressing the audience. Yet the more of a sanitised Broadway version it becomes, the less the fantasy sequences seem like an escape.
Not that Molina (Fabian Soto Pacheco), a window dresser imprisoned for soliciting a minor, or Valentin (George Blagden), a tight-lipped political prisoner, have it easy. The fight sequences by Kate Waters and back projections by Andrzej Goulding are suitably brutal. But for all the food poisoning, torture and degradation, the real thing would be so much worse.
So when Molina summons Aurora (Anna-Jane Casey) from his cineaste imagination, a movie star shimmering in gold like an Oscar statuette or high kicking like a Hollywood hoofer, the juxtaposition seems less like a release than an inappropriate tribute to the movie industry’s golden age. Casey does not dispel that notion, enjoying the big belters as much as she relishes the baddie role of the murderous Spider Woman.
Howard Hudson’s lighting turns David Woodhead’s set into film noir, while Joanna Goodwin’s choreography, all glimmering biceps and dirty vests, is bold and finely tuned. Shame the live band is out of view, but the singing is powerful under Dan Glover’s musical direction, especially in the choral numbers.
The dialogue can be blunt and the production has a fourth-wall distance, but Soto Pacheco sings with warmth and resonance, complemented by Blagden’s political rage. It adds up to a study of an unlikely friendship that impresses more than it moves.
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